Promoting Your Artist Shop

With Artist Shops, you get to concentrate on making and promoting your art (while we handle the rest), and your shop comes fully loaded with some great tools to help get the word out!

1. Update Your Homepage Collection

If you’ve ever walked by an amazing window display, you know the power that a first impression can make. However, if the display never changed, it would get less impressive with each view. It's the same with your Artist Shop! Keeping your Homepage collection updated regularly with new designs or different products to keep your Shop exciting and customers coming back to see what’s new. Looking for ideas to keep your Shop fresh, check out Nathan W. Pyle’s various homepages, he regularly features new products and is always updating the Shop banner!

Check out some other Homepage tips:

Use product or lifestyle photos rather than design images.
Activate the Best Sellers feature from your Settings page.
Whenever a new design is posted, add it to your Homepage Collection as well (Pro-tip: highlight new designs by creating a custom image with a “New” banner).
Incorporate the season, upcoming holidays, or relevant trends in your Homepage design and which products or designs you pick feature.
Use collections for designs with similar themes. This is another great place to get some additional SEO copy in.

2. Add New Designs and Products Weekly

Get into the groove of updating your Artist Shop weekly. Updates can be in the form of new designs, new products on existing designs, a fun collection, collaborations with other artists or non-profits – anything you can think of! For any new designs added, stagger the release of them instead of adding a bunch all at once. This way you give each design a chance to get seen and noticed and you can send emails and post on social about each one. Keep the momentum going regularly and don’t let it sit stagnantly.

3. Share Regularly on Social

To help spread the word, be sure to post at least 3-4 times per week across your social channels (if not more) and link back to your shop with each post in some way. Whether it’s a new design, a new product type, a sale or shipping promotion, a re-post of a customer wearing your design, a sneak peek of some work-in-progress, a tangentially related story – anything to help drive traffic and repetitive awareness of your store. Consider promoting each post as well. Even a small budget of $5-$25 per post could make an impact on total follower counts and drive more traffic to your Shop. To make sharing your products on social media even easier, you can now download images of your Artist Shop products that are optimally sized for Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter straight from your Artist Dashboard on mobile or desktop.

4. Opt into Managed Settings

Now, you can choose to let Threadless manage pricing and promotions, manage your product selection, and manage your email marketing, for your Artist Shop or the Threadless Marketplace. We've eliminated the hassle of running sales, adding new products, or setting your own retail prices.

Artist Shop Managed Pricing

Threadless will manage your Artist shop pricing and run promotions with strategically varying incentives to help your sales grow. Artist Shop promotions have a distinct promotional calendar, separate from the Marketplace, with different offers so you can strategically share promotions at various times.

Marketplace Managed Pricing

Allow your Artist Shop products to be considered for the Threadless Marketplace with pricing managed by Threadless. If selected, your shop’s products may also be discoverable in the Threadless site search, and possibly even featured in Threadless sale and promotion emails and social media communications or the Threadless homepage, giving them a greater chance to be seen and sold.

Managed Email Marketing

Allows Threadless to send email marketing communications to your customers letting them know about sales, new products or designs, and abandon cart emails. While you still manage marketing decisions like social media marketing and other self-promotion efforts, this feature allows you to expand your reach and increase sales.

Managed Product Selection

Allow Threadless to add expanded styles to existing products, optimize product color selection for better print results, and add newly released products right when they are launched. While you still manage merchandising decisions like what product you'd like to have (or not have) in your shop.

5. Shout about Sales and Promotions

"The Sale is here!" is the social post everyone loves to see in their feed. Because it so perfectly sweetens sales, strategically coordinated sales, and promotions are automatically available in your Artist Shops several times throughout the year with a banner at the top letting your customers know if you have opted into Managed Pricing & Promotions. The Promo Tools section in your Artist Dashboard gives you the option to download any of your Artist Shop products with various overlays to make it easier to promote and share your sales and promos when available.

6. Create an External Email List

One of the best ways to promote your Artist Shop is with a personal email newsletter. This can be a powerful marketing tool to create newsletters, announce giveaways, show in-process work or gifs, highlight new products/designs, or even a send a thank you to new customers. You can also integrate a third-party email sign-up on your Shop page! Because Artist Shops gives you access to your customer's order information, adding existing customers is a great way to start (However, make sure to include a way to opt-out in case they aren't interested). Keep up the momentum and turn on the Managed Email Marketing settings to your Artist Shop to double down on your email marketing efforts.

7. SEO

The internet is vast. And putting your designs out there without making sure you’ve got some solid SEO for them is a lot like fishing without bait – it’s gonna be way harder to get a bite. It is super important to ensure your shop has as much copy describing everything as possible, optimized for search. Update your shop title, your meta description, your About Page, every design’s description and tags, etc. Anywhere you can provide descriptive text will help you both in web searches and in the Threadless search.

8. Share Your Friends + Family Code or Run a Giveaway

Your Artist Shop comes with a shop-specific Friends and Family code. When this code is used, it allows the customer to purchase any of your Artist Shop products at the base price like a Shop owner. Running a giveaway in your Artist Shop not only gives the winner an amazing feeling, but it can help grow your email list, direct more traffic to your site, and increase your social media following. You can give away a free tee, a signed art print, or a gift code to let the winner pick their prize (Threadless gift cards also can be used for Artist Shop products!).

9. Check out Creative Resources

You can find lots of tips and tutorials about how to promote your Shop on our Creative Resources blog! It's full of great info like how to make your first sale, how to make your Shop more visible in search engines, and how to use social media ads. Find some more helpful promotion resources in our Guide to Promoting Your Artist Shop.